I know a little Spanish still I would argue about 1-to-1: at least you do not pronounce `h` and there are two different ways to pronounce `g`.
Obviously I'm paraphrasing someone else's study here and may be getting it slightly wrong but the gist is that English is more decipherable than it first appears.
No one is denying that English has rules mapping spelling to pronunciation for the lion's share of text. It's just that the rules are (as you say) complex and there are a lot of exceptions.
On the production side, there are a number of different opshuns for righting the seim sownds, sum ov witch are legitimate homophones, rather than just misspellings.
In languages like Spanish (or even better, Welsh, where sandhi is actually written down), as long as you know the rules, you can correctly pronounce 100% of never before seen words, and you can correctly spell a higher proportion of words than in English.
I used to work with a guy named Gerardo Ochoa. His username was gochoa, but when addressing him in person we'd sometimes call him "jochoa." (Not his real name or username, but what I'm describing is true in its essence.)